came on really mean. He was tough and he snarled
and he walked around with a big chip on his shoul-
der. You had the feeling that that was all he had going
for him: his world was so rough that acting like the
baddest and the meanest was the only way he saw to
survive in it.
He was one of those people who definitely drive all
blames into others. If you asked him a simple ques-
tion, he would tell you to fuck off. If he could get any-
body in trouble, he definitely would do so. From one
point of view, he was a total pain in the neck, but on
the other hand, he had a flair and brilliance about
him. It was always mixed; you hated him and you
loved him. He was outrageous and also sparky and
funny, but he was mean—he would slap people and
push them around. You knew that that was pretty
lightweight compared with what he was used to
doing at home, where they killed each other on a reg-
ular basis.
He was sent to Boulder, Colorado, for the summer
to give him a break, to give him a nice summer in the
Rocky Mountains. His mother and others were trying
to help him get a good education and somehow step
out of the nightmare world into which he had been
born. The people he was staying with were loosely af-
filiated with the Buddhist community, and that’s how
I came to know him. One day he came to an event
where Trungpa Rinpoche was, and at the end of this
event, Trungpa Rinpoche sang the Shambhala
Drive All Blames into One 75